Day 1 of my 3 weeks of paternity leave officially starts tomorrow. Pretty convenient timing. It just so happens that tomorrow is also the first day of March Madness. Without hyperbole it could very well be my favorite day of the year. Especially now. For the sixth year in a row, Shelbi and I are at the beach for the opening weekend of games. We drove into a completely vacant Cannon Beach a couple of hours ago. Tomorrow I will walk down to the Cannon Beach Bakery at about 8:30, order my maple bar and coffee with only a handful of locals walking the streets. By Saturday it will be a madhouse heading into Spring Break. But that's fine with me. I'm really not planning on leaving the house much between tomorrow morning and the weekend anyway. By Saturday there will be at least one empty pizza box in the kitchen, I likely will not have showered and any sunlight that happens to peek through the blinds will be promptly hissed at. It is wonderful and the fact that my wife not only tolerates me this way but also seems to enjoy this weekend at least a fraction as much as I do just makes it that much better.

This year's trip started a little differently. In years past I have gotten off work in the late afternoon on Wednesday, gone home, thrown a few clothes in a bag along with my bracket and left after rush hour. I have not attended classes or gone to work on the opening weekend of March Madness since high school. It is the second most impressive streak in my life, narrowly behind going 18 years without throwing up. A day and a half later Shelbi would join me as her school cruely schedules conferences until Friday morning. When we got our dog we bemoaned how much extra time it took to pack up things he needed. His food, his bed, his leash.

This afternoon? I had no idea what was in store. It took nearly 6 hours to get ready . With one extra lifeform we more than quadrupled our baggage and anything we could possibly forget would likely be crucially important. We transfered car seats and Shelbi mangled my seat belt so badly in the process that I was quite literally 5 seconds away from having to cut it with a pair of scissors and move all of our equipment to Shelbi's car. I have no idea how my parents got 3 boys, one of whom was just over a year old, ready for a 2 months trip around the country when I was a kid. And I have ABSOLUTELY no idea how they then thought it would be a good idea to try it again 5 years later. We were driving to the beach with one child and I nearly caused hundreds of dollars of damage to my car out of sheer frustration.

Finally I packed my trunk like a skillful Tetris player, crammed my one unoccupied back seat to the ceiling and let Shelbi drive as I held the dog for the 90 minute drive. And for 85 minutes of that drive we were both petrified that Elliott had stopped breathing in his seat or that we would hit a 12-point buck in the Cascade Mountains or that a freak snow storm would strand us like the Donner Party.

But we're here. 11 hours and counting until the first game tips off and I am at the beach with my son for the very first time. It doesn't get much better.